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“... it had become painfully evident to savants that the best minds of Antiquity – Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen – had erred. They tried to immunise themselves against further intellectual debacles by proceeding slowly and methodically, gathering up fragments of fact in preparation for a grand synthesis postponed to some remote future date. Kenny quotes ...”

“... of which so disturbed Pascal’s peace of mind. Hence, for instance, the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (d. 168 ce) accounted for the anomalies of planetary orbits as viewed from Earth by adding epicycles to them, and epicycles to epicycles, so that in his model of the world the planets were made to perform impossibly complicated loop-the-loops. All the ...”

“... is an unglamorous activity. One last story makes this point neatly. Euclid was once asked by Ptolemy, king of Alexandria, for an easier way to learn mathematics. ‘There is no royal road to geometry,’ he replied. At least in this anecdote the scientist has the last ...”

“... ghostly and prophetic way’. Stroud is a connoisseur of Moon spells and werewolves, a student of Ptolemy and Democritus, and through him you come to see how the life of the Moon accords with our deepest humours. For my generation, born as Apollo 11 cleared the launch pad, the attempt to reach the Moon seemed like the definition of human adventure. The ...”

“... rooflines recede from view, but they had no conceptual back-up from theorists. Plato, Euclid and Ptolemy were fixated on the active, probing aspects of vision: the way we peer out and construe the world before us. Their formulation, which now seems at once kooky and clunky, described eyesight as ‘extramission’ – a kind of radar. The eyes send out rays ...”

“... To sustain this happy state of affairs meant cultivating the native Egyptian populace like no Ptolemy had ever done before and also ensuring that no one in Italy could forget how valuable she was as an ally. She was in or near Rome at the time of Caesar’s assassination, but got herself out of the way before she became collateral damage. Then, in the ...”

“... unfold it to know it could be significant. Philadelphia, founded in the early third century bce by Ptolemy II, had already yielded another remarkable cache of papyri: Zenon’s archive, which consists of two thousand documents that attest in extraordinary detail to the finances and logistics of a large estate between 261 and 229 BCE. The cemetery sits to the ...”

“... is to turn from the biological to the physical sciences and recall two important episodes. From Ptolemy to the early Renaissance, astronomers thought they were making progress in understanding the solar system. As the years went by, their models became more complex but their predictions were more accurate. Yet, from our post-Copernican point of view, they ...”

“... interest in the Ptolemaic Monument, two free-standing marble columns supporting statues of Ptolemy II, ruler of Egypt from the 280s BC, and his sister/wife, the much revered queen Arsinoë II. The statues were placed to mirror those of the Philippeion, ‘perhaps … to draw a visual parallel’, reflecting the enduring power of Alexander the Great to ...”

“... in standard royal Egyptian mode; the earliest preserved image, presumably designed for her father Ptolemy XII before his death, represents her as a man. There is also a handful of coins, including one very crude issue from Cyprus, which Wyke optimistically identifies as ‘Cleopatra suckling Caesarion’. But by and large Cleopatra is, as André Malraux once ...”

“... ancient sources relate that his mummified body, en route to Aegae for burial, was hijacked by Ptolemy, one of his generals, and taken to Egypt, where it was displayed for centuries as a symbol of power and authority. Ultimately it disappeared. This helps to explain the huge impact of Andronikos’s discovery of an unplundered tomb which, as he ...”

“... are versions in triplicate of a decree instituting a cult of the then – 196 BC – reigning Ptolemy. But because the Greek version could be read without difficulty, it served as an invaluable prompt to the decipherment of the cursive and the (damaged) hieroglyphic versions. The decipherers of obsolete forms of writing needn’t concern themselves with ...”

“... Hamburg, Johann Albrecht Fabricius, brought Logan not only cordial greetings but a rare edition of Ptolemy and seven other books – a generous gift that he repaid by sending the German scholar ‘an Indian drest Buffalo skin’. Logan’s articles in Latin appeared in European scholarly journals and established his reputation for encyclopedic, precise ...”

“... not one star but two; discovered Uranus, the first addition to the known planets since the time of Ptolemy; showed our solar system (now, with Uranus, understood to be twice as big as had been thought) to be located not at the fixed centre of the universe but somewhere within a spiral galaxy outside which other galaxies stretched, vast and unimaginably ...”

“... from astrology) and medicine. Islamic astronomers such as al-Battani made many improvements to Ptolemy’s findings and methods. Later, they built observatories that functioned not unlike modern research institutes; the most famous of these were at Maragha, in present-day north-eastern Iran, which may even have housed visiting Chinese astronomers, and at ...”